


Maid of Life and Death (Her Every Breath a Blade)

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Bargaining, Desperation, Friendship, Gen, Horror, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-16
Updated: 2013-03-16
Packaged: 2017-12-05 10:42:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/722144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Furthest Ring, Skaia's light is a distant, faint blue dot, barely enough for Jane to see the contours of the rocks she threads her way between.  Now and again metal structures gleam like the edge of a blade reflecting starlight, but there are no stars in this ebon sky.  Before her lies nothing but nightmare.</p><p>It is still better than what she leaves behind.</p><p>Jane isn't made to be alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maid of Life and Death (Her Every Breath a Blade)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lantadyme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Bend Around The Blades](https://archiveofourown.org/works/464635) by [lantadyme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/pseuds/lantadyme), [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account). 



> While this story can stand on its own (...at least I devoutly hope it can!), I think it works a LOT better if you read [Bend Around the Blades](http://archiveofourown.org/works/464635) first. Additionally, my opening scene is a direct quote from lantadyme's awesome fic, so I wanted to credit her for that upfront.

Jane slips Cal's arms slowly from around her neck, fingers shaking.

"The juju. You can have him. He's not exactly useful against Lord English as he is now, but I can make him useful to you. He just needs to be full of life, right?" Jane's mouth is dry with fear. "Here's my bargain. Before she died, the Rogue of Void told me that you could reach into a player and change something about them. That you could rewrite a piece of their essence. I want you to write the Life out of me. Put it in him. Use him against your enemy. I don't care. I just want it out of me so I can go back to my quest bed and finally only have one self to juggle! So I can finally start playing this game again instead of never knowing what to do. I'm going to win this whole thing and get my friends back! But if you do this, you have to let me go afterward."

The horrorterror watches her, the awful thrumming melody of its thousand singing maws vibrating in the air. Jane can't believe how terrified she is. The icy wet of its tentacle is still wrapped around her ankle like a vise, so cold she can't feel her toes anymore. Its eye can see through her in a million ways, can see the aspects of her soul and can do with them as it wills. She is a fly in its hand and it can crush her if it wants, take what she offers and give her nothing in return.

She squeezes her eyes shut again, praying and praying that the vision she saw in Prospit's clouds matches what will happen in these next critical moments.

\------

She needs an anchor. No, three anchors: one for Jake, to give her hope; one for Roxy, a map to follow through the void; and one for Dirk, because it's his garbled notes that form the soul of this threadbare excuse for a plan. Symbolism is important in this game and she needs her friends with her, needs to remind herself she's not supposed to be alone, that they're meant to be _alive_.

Jane chooses a jacket because whatever flame runs through her veins, chaining her to an excess of unwanted life, burns like fear and the coming of ice. The fabric is green like the height of summer. She chooses a scarf because space is cold and smells of bitter ash. The fabric bears the fading trace of alcohol and the scent of forgotten flowers. She chooses Cal because need is an unforgiving mistress, and because his arms can wrap around her shoulders in a parody of a hug.

The fabric is warm.

In the Furthest Ring, Skaia's light is a distant, faint blue dot, barely enough for Jane to see the contours of the rocks she threads her way between. Now and again metal structures gleam like the edge of a blade reflecting starlight, but there are no stars in this ebon sky. Before her lies nothing but nightmare.

It is still better than what she leaves behind.

Jane clutches her talismans and flies into the void.

\------

"You said to watch the clouds. I watched. You said to wait until I had a plan. I did. I do. You've heard it," Jane says. "You can't keep me here forever, even for my own good. Derse is on the other side of Skaia. I'll never have a better chance."

The White Queen stands silent in the doorway.

"I _have_ to do this," Jane says. "I have to." She stands from the bed, leaves her waking body behind in its borrowed golden clothes. Her dream self is stronger than her waking body, can go days upon days without sleep, can fly.

The Queen is silent. Disapproving? Understanding? Her face is alien, impossible to read, but Jane knows she cares. Has felt the brush of cool, segmented fingers through her hair, like a mother soothing a fevered child. Remembers the joy with which she was welcomed to Prospit, after her nightmarish trip through the dark.

"Am I doing the right thing?" Jane asks.

The Queen glides across the floor with eerie, insectile grace, and joins Jane at the high, barred window. Prospit's moon is at apogee and they look out onto darkness rather than Skaia's brilliant, enigmatic clouds. The globe-tipped scepter hangs heavy in the Queen's hand, still cracked from blocking Jane's desperate escape attempt last week. Its blue-white glow is the only source of light in the cell.

"Heroes of Time rewrite the universe without qualm," the Queen says in her whisper-echo voice, more like a dream of speech than actual sound traveling through air to jostle the inner workings of Jane's ears.

"But that's not my power," Jane says, sidestepping the argument about whether she still counts as a hero. "That's not my role. I've been reading the books you lent me and they all say it's dangerous for players to act against their aspects and titles."

"You seek to restore life," the Queen says. "There is no higher expression of your aspect."

Jane stares outward into the dark. The ravaged ruins of the Land of Mounds and Xenon drift in the distance, shattered crystals in the asteroids reflecting Skaia's glow. Every time they circle past the smear of stone across the heavens is a hand's breadth longer, more attenuated, as gravity loses its grip on what once was a whole and sleeping world. The skeleton beasts still move among the shards in a parody of life, limbs paddling helplessly in the absence of stable earth. Someday they will fall like meteors onto Dirk's and Roxy's planets, burning up in streaks of fire and poison gas.

Everything burns in time. Only Jane revives.

"My aspect, but not my title," she says, turning her back on the beckoning dark. "I only heal myself. I tried so hard-- I would _tear myself open_ if it would bring them back. But I can't. I couldn't. That's not how it works. And I've never been any good at breaking the rules."

The Queen looks down at her scepter and strokes one segmented finger across the shining globe, chitin waking a strange, high chime from the glassy surface. Then she raises the scepter -- casually, lightly, as if to break the spell that binds Jane's other body to constant dreams -- and smashes it on the sill.

The light winks out.

"Life and growth," says the White Queen, "are the possibility of change."

She leaves the door unlocked behind her.

\------

Jane resurrects in a sphere of frozen fire, wrapped tight around herself as she drifts in weightless space. She blinks, uncurls, and shoves her hands through dying flames. "Roxy! Jake! Wake up!"

It's too late, she knows it's too late, but maybe there's hope, maybe they managed to hide, maybe she'll wake and find this was all a dream.

GG: Guys? Where are you?  
GG: Jake?  
GG: Roxy?  
GG: I'm sorry I didn't see the Miles sooner. They came up from the ground, not down from the sky.  
GG: Did I wake you in time?  
GG: Guys?  
GG: Make some noise so I can find you.  
GG: Please.

Massive chunks of stone surround her, some still bearing a layer of soil and grass. Jane thrashes, struggles to swim through air toward the nearest, to something she can use to push off and navigate her way through this sudden deadly maze. If she were dreaming she could fly, but her waking body has no such power.

She ricochets through the shadow-strewn wreckage, frantically calling.

No one answers.

She finds Roxy first. For a moment she thinks her friend is only sleeping, still trawling the void for a sign of Dirk, her body floating in a loose-limbed sprawl as she spins in a slow and gentle spiral. Jane kicks toward Roxy, intending to shake her into consciousness and tease her for sleeping through the attack. Her hand is stretched out, a laugh born of desperate relief kindling in her lungs. Then the blood on Roxy's shirt rotates into view. Then the gaping ruin of her torso, punched through from behind by a writhing spear of blood-red light.

Tiny drops of blood trail from the wound like a chain of rubies.

Jane is frozen, blood running liquid-cold like the ice-blue flame that feeds on something in her soul. Her fingers graze Roxy's shoulder, clutch stiffly on the cooling skin. She has so much life inside her, an endless river of fire, but it's caught behind glass, unable to leap the gap and sink into any other bones. Jane cuts her hand on a nearby shard of stone. She presses the wound against Roxy's ribs. She hopes.

Nothing. Just more red spinning useless into the dark before blue flame licks the wound away.

She ties Roxy's scarf around her waist, tethering herself to the corpse, and continues her search.

Jake's body is worse.

\------

Jane yanks off her breath mask and vomits out the window. She leans her head against the jagged concrete wall of the skyscraper tomb and breathes deep. In. Out. In. Out. In.

"Janey?" Roxy's voice crackles thin and distant over the radio alchemized into the mask. "You gotta breathe, Janey. Oxygen's a requirement, not an option. I can't-- we can't lose you too."

"I'd come back," Jane whispers into the poison air, too soft for the radio to catch the words. She always comes back, whether she wants to or not.

Then she breathes out, expelling the last traces of krypton from her lungs. She slips the scarlet tiara back over her head, adjusts the clear plastic faceplate and filter over her face. "I didn't mean to worry you, Ro-Lal. I'm... well, I'm obviously not okay. None of us is okay. This is not a situation that could ever possibly be okay! But. I just."

"No shame in needing a moment to wrap your noggin around the reality of things. I dare say we all share that feeling," Jake says in a hollow imitation of bracing cheer. He skirts around a gaping hole in the floor and punches Jane lightly in the shoulder. "Buck up, Jane. He wouldn't have wanted us to mope around like a gaggle of collywobblers. We need to investigate! That's your bailiwick, isn't it?"

"Investigate what? You know the signs of the Red Miles as well as I do," Jane says.

"Investigate what Dirk was doing here -- what he and Lil' Hal thought was important enough to risk both bodies together in one place," Roxy says. She is still sitting in the corner, legs splayed out and back braced against the walls as if they are the only thing holding her together. "You know them and their plans. They never want to share until they're perfect. Stupid Mister Mysterious act and their thing about their image."

She looks down at the decapitated head in her lap, strokes a fingertip over the fractured shades. "They've got so many files on here -- so paranoid, never trust anything to the cloud. Trusted. Fucking _idiots_ , always making my life harder." She strokes the shades again, cards her fingers through blood-caked hair. "I'll pull what I can, see if I can sort through the garbage. You should poke around, see if there's any meatspace clues."

Jane looks at Dirk's corpses. She looks away. "I would like to know how the Dignitary caught him unaware, I suppose. That could be important." She takes a deep breath, listens to the hiss of air through the compressor and filter of her mask. It sounds like flames. "Yes. I can do that. Jake?"

"I believe I'll take a nap," Jake says, stripping off his green overshirt and wadding it up in his hands. "What? Strider may be dead, but that doesn't mean he's gone entirely. Dream bubbles, ladies! His ghost must be out somewhere in the void, tapping his feet and wondering why it's taking us so long to find him." He lies down on the filthy concrete floor, heedless of spatters or the generations of dust. Shirt tucked under his head, he drops off in a heartbeat.

Jane envies that knack. She doesn't know if she'll ever sleep again.

She scoops Cal's body from the floor -- the only thing in the room somehow untouched by blood -- and begins her investigation.

\------

"Have you heard from uranianUmbra lately?" Dirk asks. His breath hardly stirs the air, whisper-soft words falling into Jane's ear from a bare inch away. His body presses tight against hers as they huddle in a shallow niche halfway up a glass pyramid, waiting for the troop of skeletons to straggle past two stories underneath.

"No, why?" Jane whispers back.

"Roxy and Jake haven't either, and I haven't heard from her brother since just after you entered the Medium. He told me to take Cal and hit the roof and that's all she wrote," Dirk says. "It's fuckin' weird. He's never left me alone so long."

Jane thinks back to her few conversations with undyingUmbrage and grimaces. "Are you _complaining?_ I'd think that calls for celebration."

Dirk shrugs, the motion rucking up Jane's sleeve where their shoulders touch. "It's not like I'm going to mourn the little shitstain, but I can't help thinking it's a bad sign. Especially since he left a bunch of conversational threads hanging -- shitty twists he was going to reveal, pointless games he was trying to win, stuff like that."

"Perhaps he's simply lost track of our relative timelines," Jane suggests. "From what you've said, he's never cared about that the way uranianUmbra does."

One of the skeletons turns toward the pyramid and scrabbles briefly at the bricks of glass with its forepaws. Another breaks from the pack and joins it. Jane presses backward into the niche as far as she can go, hoping the brilliant flux and glare of the neon trapped inside the pyramid will camouflage her and Dirk from whatever the creatures use by way of vision.

After a minute, the two skeletons shamble back toward their fellows and continue their slow trek along the rust-red plain.

Dirk inches forward, twisting left to see how many creatures are left in the pack. He grunts.

Jane prods the small of his back with the tines of her fork. "How much longer until we can abscond? We're already running late for the council session on Prospit."

"If they keep up this pace, maybe five, ten minutes," Dirk mutters. He squeezes back into the niche, shoving Jane's hand aside. "Anyway, maybe you're right and undyingUmbrage is just fucking with us, but I've still got a bad feeling. Something's off-kilter with the whole game, like we screwed up a major save point a while back and now we're just marking time until we all kick the bucket. You notice how even the air feels dead?"

"Our planets are populated by nothing but skeleton zombies. Of course the air feels dead. What else did you expect?" Jane says. She resolutely ignores the way Skaia's clouds show fewer visions every time she sleeps. The way the carved clues and puzzles seem to vanish from their lands without a trace -- not as if they've been stolen, but as if they never existed at all. The way there was no sign of her father on Derse the last time Roxy went there for recon.

"I'm not talking about dust and bones, or even just the way emptiness can get to you. I know what all that's like -- I grew up in an apartment that'd been abandoned for four centuries out in the middle of the ocean," Dirk says. "I mean what's underneath all that. You remember how events fell together and basically forced us into playing Sburb. There was a goal and sense of motion. That's gone now, and not just because we're supposed to wait for a quartet of so-called gods to show up. I don't think they're coming. I think we missed the reunion."

Jane kicks him in the ankle. "Stealing the Ring of Orbs Nofold from the Draconian Dignitary, overthrowing the Batterwitch, and making peace between Prospit and Derse don't count as goals anymore?"

"They're make-work. Finger exercises. Shit we're doing to distract ourselves from realizing how utterly boned we are," Dirk says.

Below them, the last of the skeletons turns the corner around the base of the glass pyramid.

"And I suppose you have some grand plan to unbone us, Di-Stri?" Jane demands. "Yet another chance to demonstrate your mastery of the strings?"

She jumps down to the earth before he can answer. After months in the Medium, she's more than strong enough to take the impact.

Dirk follows a moment later, lands in a silent puff of reddish dust, offers her a hand up from her crouch. "I'm working on it."

Jane takes his hand.

\------

Jane wakes, shivering, at the center of a perfect circle of frost-scarred tiles. Around her purple rubble rises to shoulder-height, shifting ominously when she draws breath and begins to climb from her unlikely bubble of safety.

Dirk's dream self lies unmoving just beyond the pile of stones, shades knocked askew and purple pajamas dotted with dust and pebbles.

Blood-red streaks lash overhead like strangely organic lightning, lance through a nearby tower, send cascades of brick and tile crashing to the ledge where Jane crouches over her friend's limp body. She holds her hand over his lips, counts to three. Yes. Breath against her palm; he's alive.

Red writhes through the air, sends offshoots falling like the bars of a cage.

Jane flings Dirk over her shoulder and runs.

GG: Check in!  
GG: Did everyone make it into the Medium?  
GG: Tell me you're all right.  
GG: Please.

She has no idea where she is, let alone where she should go to escape the destruction. The red magic seems to descend from above, so climbing is probably dangerous, but staying on the ground exposes her to falling rocks, which is equally unsafe. She dashes through the streets, spots a crowd of people who look rather like bipedal alien ants dressed all in gray, and ducks into a doorway to hide.

GG: I'm in a strange city that seems to be built of interlocking purple cathedrals.  
GG: It is currently being ripped apart by some form of red death rays. Or death tentacles. They're a trifle hard to describe.  
GG: They're also a bit difficult to evade.

The building shudders. Jane reels into the street moments before the ceiling falls in.

Dirk weighs far, far less than he ought to. Perhaps dream selves are only half tangible. Perhaps that is how he was able to fly.

She wishes she could wake from this dream.

GT: Hi jane im here.  
GT: Dirk sent his robot bunny to drag me back to hellmurder island.  
GT: All the sburb equipment was set up in the ruins of my grandmas house so i grew a tree on the alchemiter and twiddled my thumbs until the countdown hit zero.  
GT: Now im surrounded by green terraces with a blue sun in a black sky and funny red stonehenge things in the distance.   
GG: Jake! Thank goodness you're alive.   
GT: You cant keep an adventuring man down!  
GT: Speaking of which how is it that youre not dead yourself?  
GT: Im pretty darn certain i saw you die on derse when a spear of super deadly red shit stabbed you through the gut and then a ton of purple rocks dropped on your bally head.   
GG: Oh.  
GG: Um.  
GG: Really?   
GT: Yes.  
GT: I dont want to imply that im in any way ungrateful to discover a good friend unexpectedly alive!  
GT: But it does strike me as somewhat farfetched under the circumstances.   
GG: Oh drat, I have to go.

The street cracks open. Flames gush upward from the chasm, as if this strange world is a hollow vessel filled with fuel, bursting alight at the merest spark. Jane leaps for safety, scrabbles on the tilting tiles, and hurls Dirk ahead of her through an archway. The ground beyond is almost level. She seizes his body and staggers onward.

Her sides stab with each step, each breath. Her arms feel bruised, pain sinking into joints and bones. Her hands and knees are scraped and raw with blood.

She limps across a bridge: a narrow, graceful arch over a canal now filled with thrashing waves. It snaps behind her, thunders down in a waterfall of stone.

Jane runs.

TT: Jane, change of plans.  
TT: I need you to find Roxy and a transportalizer, in that order.   
GG: I don't have time for that!  
GG: It may have escaped your near-omniscient attention, but I'm running for my life at the moment!  
GG: And Dirk's life, if that means anything to you.   
TT: It means something. I wouldn't have bothered getting him into the Medium and then alchemizing him a gas mask if I didn't care.  
TT: He's knocked out but otherwise fine.   
GG: Good. What about Roxy?   
TT: Roxy died, but if my calculations are correct there's a 92.0856 percent probability that a robot mashing the lips of her disembodied head against the lips of Dirk's unconscious face successfully transferred her consciousness to her dream self.  
TT: She should be flying back toward Derse.  
TT: I need you to intercept her.   
GG: Her disembodied head?  
GG: What in tarnation has been happening?!   
TT: To borrow a phrase, deadly red stuff has been raining from the skies on Earth as well as Derse.  
TT: Roxy got skewered.  
TT: Turned into shish kebab.  
TT: Killed, basically.   
GG: No!   
TT: Yes.  
TT: But while I'm not omniscient, I do have phenomenal processing power and I whipped up a contingency plan.   
GT: Involving Roxy's decapitated head.   
TT: Yeah, Roxy's decapitated head. Also two robots, a rocketboard, a fenestrated plane, and a sendificator.   
GG: I don't think I want to know the details.  
GG: If her dream self is alive, why hasn't she contacted us already?   
TT: Her sylladex wouldn't have transferred along with her consciousness. She doesn't have any way to access Pesterchum.  
TT: That's why you need to find her.  
TT: Then use a transportalizer to escape the immediate reach of the Red Miles.   
GG: I don't see why you think she won't simply fly to safety.  
GG: In fact she's more likely to be the one rescuing me.   
TT: That's exactly why she needs you to rescue her. Otherwise she'll try to save everyone on Derse and get herself killed again.  
TT: For keeps.  
TT: You're the only one with infinite respawn powers, Jane Crocker. Use them wisely.  
TT: I'll catch you later.

Jane wastes precious seconds staring at the screen. Then she staggers back to her feet, heaves Dirk into a precarious piggyback position -- his head lolls on her shoulder, his arms limp and boneless down her chest -- and begins to climb.

The Red Miles have no aim that she can see, no mind choosing one target over another. Every place is equally unsafe. If she can't die -- and maybe that's true, maybe that's the game's backhanded gift for everything it's taking away -- then why not stand at the top of the highest tower she can find and scream at the top of her lungs?

"Roxy! Roxy Lalonde! Ro-Lal! Roxy, Roxy, Roxy!" Jane shouts her best friend's name into the void. And again. And again. The Red Miles lash and writhe around her, split and recombine in bursts of bloody light, but this sheared-off tower stays aloft.

Jane shades her eyes, stares into the red-laced, ink-black sky, searches for a dot of purple crowned with white.

At the distant corners of her eyes, in the background murmur of her ears, something vast and non-Euclidean searches back. Its touch is cold like an infinity of crushing dark, patient beyond human comprehension. Jane shudders, fights back the urge to retch.

"Roxy! Olly, olly oxen free! Paging Doctor Ro-Lal! This is no time to stare into the abyss, especially not if it actually looks back! Roxy!"

"Sheesh, what's with all the shouting? Calm your tits, I'm not deaf," a sweet, slurred voice says from behind her. "An' quit waving at the horrorterrors. They won't hurt me, but you don't wanna snag their attention."

Jane whirls. Roxy sways in the air, feet dangling a bare yard above the tower's jagged rim. She tucks a hank of white hair behind her ears and waves. "Heeeeyyyyy, Janey. What's a classy girl like you doing in a place like this?"

Jane pulls her friend down into a desperate hug. Roxy flails, then rests one hand on her shoulder, pats her tentatively on the back. "'s okay, Jane. I'm here, we'll be fine, I promise. Just... don't cry, 'kay? C'mon, shoosh, 's okay, I swear."

Jane buries her face in Roxy's shoulder and breathes.

The presence in the dark pulls back, for now.

\------

Jane's foot lands on the dry, dead soil of the Land of Crypts and Helium, raising a tiny puff of grayish dust. She would be running if the light were better, but there's no sense in hurrying only to get hurt. Her house is just ahead and she desperately wants to see something normal and familiar in this desolate world.

She blinks at the refrigerator lying in the yard, then at the hole in the wall. Somehow the damage and surrealism seem worse now than when she was trying to get the house back to the surface. But she can jump the gap from the causeway to her yard and gather some supplies before she heads out in search of her errant father.

She stumbles when she lands, buries her hands in grass still green with the last gasp of autumn before its winter sleep. The soil is heavy and wet, still drenched from the dam's overflow, and this world is warm despite the sunless sky. Jane wonders if the grass will grow, or if whatever drained the leafless trees and trapped the flowers under stone will kill this remnant of her former life.

She breathes the scent of earth and grass, imagines blue skies and summer sun, remembers her father's voice and the warmth of his hands holding her safe when she was small.

Then she wipes her hands and ventures through the broken wall.

The house is eerily silent, broken only by the faint hiss of helium in the balloon and the distant, useless patter of rain on barren earth. Aside from her father Jane is the only living person on this planet, and the longer he is gone, the more she feels as if she's fallen into a warped reflection of reality, a mirror shard where she is truly the only living person in the universe.

She looks at her computer, thinks of contacting her friends. She can't win this game without them. She wouldn't even want to.

Jane isn't made to be alone.

-//-//-//-//-//-

We accept your bargain.

Time stutters. Space bends. Reality breaks.

The game rewrites itself, months of data unhappened in the blink of a thousand impossible eyes.

-\\\\-\\\\-\\\\-\\\\-\\\\-

Jane's foot lands on the dry, dead soil of the Land of Crypts and Helium, raising a tiny puff of grayish dust. She wobbles, oddly off balance for a moment, then continues onward, nearly running despite the iffy light. Her house is just ahead and she desperately wants to see something normal and familiar in this desolate world.

She blinks at the refrigerator lying in the yard, then at the hole in the wall, and then again at the brilliant splotch of purple among the drywall fragments. She has the strangest notion that it wasn't there a second ago, but no, her eyes don't lie. There is an alien clown in front of her house, standing on the fallen refrigerator.

As Jane approaches, he smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> As you can see, I wrote with the assumption that lantadyme's story takes place in a doomed timeline... and since the Alpha session has no Time player, Jane's bargain with the horrorterrors is the only way to reset it. The split point happens when Jane returns to her house after successfully raising it from the pit, and either encounters or fails to encounter Gamzee. In the doomed timeline, this means that Calliope and Caliborn immediately lose contact with the Alpha kids, with the ancillary result that Dirk doesn't pull Cal out on his roof or drop him into the ocean.
> 
> I think the differences in the entry sequence are self-explanatory, but I will mention that this version of Roxy doesn't end up in the dream bubble with the meteor crew and therefore doesn't abscond with Serenity. Dirk and Jake likewise end up in different dream bubbles which means that, without Aranea's boost, Dirk can't wake in time to pull off his crazy stunt with the frog temple time capsule and the Auto-Responder has to improvise a different way to revive Roxy.


End file.
